Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting April 19th

https://twitter.com/twitchsupport/status/1892277199497043994

by aestetix • 1 year ago

173 166 1 year ago

If less than 0.5% of users upload over 100hrs, then either this is an extreme penny pinching move, or some few in that 0.5% upload a massive overage of content.

thisgoodlife• 1 year ago

I guess it’s the latter. If you can afford, give your users a generous offer, but never unlimited. Otherwise, some people will find very creative ways to abuse it.

bloomingkales• 1 year ago

That’s kind of the main consideration with production LLM apps right now. Really looking for a startup that solves this out of the box (llm credit payment system that manages the reality that remote LLM usage can never be unlimited).

Twitch will offer a premium sub for heavy users most likely.

jsheard4• 1 year ago

Yep, full time streamers run up a lot of hours.

https://bsky.app/profile/authorblu.es/post/3likxmdytys2l

Assuming ~6000kbit/sec that's about 17TB of archived video for that guy alone.

nutrientharvest• 1 year ago

It's the latter. Some people abuse the system by highlighting the full length of every broadcast, turning their highlights section into a complete archive of their streams, which is not something Twitch ever wanted to offer.

MSM• 1 year ago

I don't think it's fair to say twitch "never wanted to offer" when not long ago, that behavior was the base functionality. You could rewatch everyone's entire streams forever. There was a DMCA scare at some point when streamers were getting in trouble for their old streams having music and many took down all of their history, but before then you'd see years worth of streams for people

fcoury• 1 year ago

I did that, but not as a way to abuse the system. I used to export all my streams to YouTube directly from Twitch without downloading it first. I would just trim the beginning of the stream and sometimes split in more than one video if I had multiple content in one stream. I have hundreds of videos starting from 2018. I just thought this was ok and now I'm going through the effort of exporting them individually to a youtube account. I wish they had offered at least a way to export or download them in batch.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

This is the standard outcome for any type of hosting service that starts out with low/no limitations. The vast majority of the users use it in a way that's sustainable for both parties, and then there's a small subset of users who abuse the system to such an extent that it becomes financially infeasible. Nearly every free hosting service in history has jumped through these hoops at one point.

tsunitsuni• 1 year ago

0.5% of users is still a lot of people, especially on Twitch. Streaming with more than 11 viewers puts you in the top 3% already: https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1367868296473813001

fsflover• 1 year ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137085

aestetix• 1 year ago

I actually submitted this two days ago, as you can see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aestetix

I wonder why it's showing "2 hours ago" and it's now showing up.

davethedevguy• 1 year ago

Could be the second chance pool

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309

DeepSeaTortoise• 1 year ago

Wonder if there's going to be a bidding war between sponsors on who gets to keep their videos

pr337h4m• 1 year ago

Short-sighted move, super long video data could be quite useful in the near future

washadjeffmad2• 1 year ago

The infographic says "New 100-Hour Highlights & Uploads Storage Limit".

Past Broadcasts (VODs) and Clips are unaffected.

moefh3• 1 year ago

Normal VODs already automatically "expire" (i.e., are automatically deleted) after a certain time. IIRC the time limit is between 7 and 60 days depending on your account type (e.g. whether you're a Twitch partner, whether you have Twitch Prime, etc.).

Making a VOD a highlight was a way around that -- Twitch would never delete those.

EwanToo• 1 year ago

Deleting it from the public site doesn't mean they're not keeping it for internal use...

anticensor• 1 year ago

What if they intend to rotate storage, replacing old content by newer content over a period of 2 months, plus 100h/user of non-replaceable content?

phyzome• 1 year ago

What ever for?

DecoySalamander• 1 year ago

Supposedly for training models to generate gameplay videos, like what Microsoft (and others) have presented [0] recently.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-mu...

whywhywhywhy• 1 year ago

If people watch it currently then it has value in a training set.

chris_wot• 1 year ago

Isn't this just happening on the highlights section? If so, seems reasonable - am I missing something?

protimewaster2• 1 year ago

I don't use Twitch much, but, based on what other users have said, I think highlights was the only part not already subjected to automatic deletion after 60 days.

So I think the reaction is because there's no now way to keep over 100 hours of video long term on Twitch?

gradientsrneat• 1 year ago

That and non-streamed "uploads". Twitch refers to videos produced by streaming as VODs, which are not affected. Weird terminology.

mbasho• 1 year ago

I don't understand why not just target abusive accounts. Maybe the speed running community will have to find a new home.

jsheard4• 1 year ago

Isn't that exactly what they're doing? You have to draw the line for abuse somewhere, and they've drawn it at 100 hours.

ctrl-j• 1 year ago

There are playthroughs of single games that are more than 100 hours. Even if you're only playing "short" games, you're looking at 6-10 hours, which means you only give your audience a library of 10-15 vods? Average games are 20-40, so 5?

Vod viewing on twitch is also a pain, ads every 10 minutes, buggy playback, and vods don't play in order.

What's going to happen is anyone currently storing their playthroughs on twitch is now going to export to youtube. So I guess they want youtube to get the ad rev.

krykp• 1 year ago

I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit feels to me, a less reasonable stance.

In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference either way, the vast majority of the people that can have noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube channels or other venues they are also making money from.

Dylan168076• 1 year ago

100 hours is way too small to represent abuse of the system.

Highlight one hour per week, or even half an hour per week, and you'll fly right over that limit.

bhickey2• 1 year ago

I don't think this will impact speedrunning much:

This won’t apply to Past Broadcasts (VODs) or clips.

cbhl• 1 year ago

On Twitch, Past Broadcasts (VODs) are already deleted after 60 days.

If you see a video-on-demand that is older than that, then that is an “upload” and not a “VOD” and thus is in-scope.

bakugo• 1 year ago

Twitch only stores Past Broadcasts for 2 months before they're automatically deleted. If you want to keep them past the 2 months, you have to convert them into Highlights, which are affected.

So yes, this will absolutely affect the speedrunning community, and anyone else who has been using this method to archive old streams.

mrkramer4• 1 year ago

Speedrunners are worried: https://bsky.app/profile/summoningsalt.bsky.social/post/3lik...

philipov• 1 year ago

The big problem with this move is that it doesn't give people enough time to migrate, and they can't make new highlights while they struggle to download upwards of 3000 hours (in the multiple terabytes) of old video, at the same time as hundreds or thousands of other partners doing the same thing.

This affects far more people at a much higher scale than Twitch will admit, and the deadline given isn't enough for these data transfers to complete.

anon70002• 1 year ago

It literally says it doesn’t apply to past streams?

bob10292• 1 year ago

the speed running community

I was under the impression that the principal objective of speed running was to get things done quickly. You should be able to fit a lot of valuable information within the quota if you are any good at it.

Capricorn2481• 1 year ago

Not really. That's like saying a wrestler is only in the match for a few minutes so why do they need all of that training.

Speedrunners are often playing the game or parts of the game hundreds of times. And they're usually performing techniques that take lots of precision and therefore lots of practice.

So they stream it all, documenting their attempts and trying new strategies in front of a live audience. They produce so much comment that there are YouTube channels that make documentaries about different speedrunners.

emacsen2• 1 year ago

This comes from a misunderstanding of what speedrunning is.

It's not merely doing something quickly; it's more akin to a sport.

The objective of speedrunning is to perform something you would do in a game in a record time, or it's now been somewhat expanded to sometimes include or mean some extraordinary feat in a game that may not be directly related to speed.

A speedrun of a game might mean to complete a game that would normally take months in (for example) "only 10 hours", in which case the speedrunner needs to be live for those ten hours. A recording is not an acceptable substitute due to issues of cheating[1].

Even if a speedrun is only two hours, a speedrunner may need to play the same game four, five, or twelve times in order to achieve their objective. They could be playing for an hour and fifty minutes only to have the entire run ruined by a mistake, or even just a random game event.

[1] It's still possible to cheat live, but it's more complicated, more challenging, and there's a greater likelihood of being caught.

EfficientDude3• 1 year ago

Speedrunning is mostly cheaters using combinations of emulation, save states, etc. I don't think speedrunners actually speedrun on unmodified consoles in one go at all these days. Of course back in the day anything other than playing on a console attached to a TV would have been considered cheating and gotten you thrown out of the community.

heraldgeezer• 1 year ago

[Ending] Baten Kaitos 100% Speedrun in 338 Hours, 43 Minutes and 26 Seconds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FezT4GTZj0g

FAQ why its so long

https://pastebin.com/BRvPJ430

- Why is it so long? In this game, items evolve over time. There is an item, the Shampoo, that takes literally 2 weeks (= 336 hours) to evolve into Splendid Hair.

genewitch7• 1 year ago

one of the only long speedruns i ever watched was the ~28 hour Red Dead Redemption 2 speedrun. these are called like no-glitch any% runs, meaning no sidestepping content in a way that isn't intended (eg in gta using an ambulance to get over the gated walls). So "the fastest a game can be played from beginning to end credits, normally."

These are different than the glitch any% runs, which, for example, Fallout 4 is something like 34 seconds, you do something to fall through the ground and then run to a specific place and it triggers the <no spoilers>, end credits roll.

genewitch7• 1 year ago

tomorrow evening around 5AM UTC i will try to have a "Show HN: Seamlessly move your VOD from twitch to youtube (or...)" there is a youtube-uploader (or was) that i've used in the past for unattended uploads. yt-dlp <twitch vod uri> | youtube-upload

I'm gunna charge $1000 a month with no free tier.

edit: oh well https://github.com/Zibbp/ganymede

trackofalljades• 1 year ago

Archive Team? (shines bat signal)

monero-xmr• 1 year ago

Not everything is worth archiving for all eternity. Do we really need a 300 hour Final Fantasy 7 playthrough with 3 viewers archived for all eternity like it’s the Magna Carta

Funes-• 1 year ago

But that's missing the point of what archiving content on the Internet tends to be mostly about: you cannot possibly go through all of it and decide what's worth archiving, so you archive it all by default. Then, you can skim through it or remove whatever you choose to.

tdhz77• 1 year ago

When we find out John Smith played final fantasy before establishing the earliest of human rights. Maybe?

badlibrarian4• 1 year ago

Vimeo banned video game content in 2008. Users migrated to other sites that were soon worth far more than Vimeo.

Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope. This conflicts with short term growth strategies but perhaps there's a little room for ethics to sneak in.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/vimeo-bans-v...

EfficientDude3• 1 year ago

Just to be clear - no video streaming site or service has been profitable in the long run, not yet anyway.

joseda-hg2• 1 year ago

Are there any numbers on YouTube? While I don't doubt their costs are orders of magnitude bigger that other services, they also operate at a different scale operate as a defacto music service (I'm not talking about YT Music), and have the largest pool of ads to serve

StressedDev2• 1 year ago

Netflix is very profitable. Its net income for 2022 was $4.4 billion; for 2023 it was $5.4 billion; and in 2024 it was $8.7 billion. For more information, go to https://ir.netflix.net/financials/quarterly-earnings/default... . The 2024 Q4 earning announcement has a spread sheet with Netflix's financial results for the last 3 years.

rchaud• 1 year ago

And yet it is not Vimeo who has to delete petabytes of data to cut costs.

badlibrarian4• 1 year ago

Not the point of my original post, but Vimeo is famous for layoffs and firing expensive customers, too. In March 2022 they told some users that their channels would now cost thousands of dollars a month.

Dylan168076• 1 year ago

Focusing on video game material instead of being neutral and coming up with a reasonable business model that makes sense for all your customers (then communicating it up front) is the problem. There's always going to be a subset of customers that pushes the envelope.

Are you implying that the videos getting hit by this are not generally video game content?

I don't think that's right. In particular there's a lot of speedrun recordings that are going to disappear when this day hits.

(The HN title had to cut some of the explanation for brevity, probably 99% of what is going to get deleted is long highlights, not uploads.)

genewitch7• 1 year ago

if you know of any speedruns that are going to be lost, and you care, upload them to youtube and then link them on speedrun.com or something. Expecting one of the richest companies in america to just "host video" for users is too much.

wpm• 1 year ago

Twitch’s largest category is “just chatting”. A large chunk of the content they serve has nothing to do with video games.

badlibrarian4• 1 year ago

That's because it's the catch all that won't get you banned for setting the wrong category.

mattmaroon4• 1 year ago

If this is a thing that really matters, it wouldn't be that hard to build a competitor right?

claudex• 1 year ago

the problem to build a competitor is the community, not the technical part. If one (or a handful of) streamer move elsewhere, most of the viewers won't follow him

mattmaroon4• 1 year ago

Of course. But we've seen it happen before. Digg had a huge lead on Reddit, angered the community enough that they left. Myspace v Facebook. Etc.

I don't use Twitch deeply so I'm not sure if this is a big enough thing to make people switch in large numbers, but if it is, the tech stack just doesn't seem like a moat at all these days. If anything, I'd say the fact that they prune old content already sort of is the opposite. YouTube's deep content library makes it hard to compete with them. Twitch purposefully doesn't even have one.

A skilled programmer could probably bang out a viable competitor in a week, and raise funds just as fast if the AWS bill became significant.

AraceliHarker3• 1 year ago

That's exactly why Mixer failed to gain popularity, even after poaching streamers like Ninja from Twitch.

brudgers• 1 year ago

It is as hard or easy as finding the right people. For reference, Amazon bought Twitch for about a billion dollars instead of trying to build it.

Figs• 1 year ago

The competitor already exists and at least some people are already using it: PeerTube.

Run it yourself, and you can save whatever videos your community cares about for as long as you fucking feel like because YOU OWN IT. None of YouTube's asinine copyright strike bullshit to worry about -- if a company has a problem with your use of something they need to send you a real DMCA notice. None of Twitch's random policy change bullshit to worry about. No advertising. If your community actually gives a shit about the content then they will pitch in to pay for the hosting through Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, etc -- or mirror it themselves. Any streamer with a decent number of viewers will almost certainly have someone in the audience who is technically capable of running an instance if the streamer can't or doesn't want to DIY.

I get being on YouTube and Twitch -- PeerTube's discoverability sucks -- but for goodness sake, take ownership of your archives! If you make videos, that is your long tail! That is your legacy! Own it!

mrkramer4• 1 year ago

In one of my thought experiments I was thinking would only audio livestreaming be viable social platform for content creators because audio is like 90% smaller in size and therefore you don't need to spend loads of money to setup and maintain audio livestreaming infrastructure.

Btw, I think there is an easy option to export your Twitch content to YouTube so that's another way of saving all the content.

vasco3• 1 year ago

So online radio stations? I think its been tried a lot, for decades, and while I don't listen often it is not never. I think people gravitate towards spotify "radio" without anyone talking or podcasts for this use case though.

mrkramer4• 1 year ago

Yes online radio station plus social features like Twitch and even Twitch streamers could restream their live audio to this new audio platform.

When you think about social audio, who is number one? Spotify is music subscription service and it's not really YouTube for audio meant for content creators and SoundCloud is stuck in time and it never really took off.

I would like to see SoundCloud reimagined with new features and ideas.

madshougesen2• 1 year ago

Clubhouse was pretty big for a while.

X Spaces is also big-ish (?), but mostly used by crypto scammers.

mrkramer4• 1 year ago

Clubhouse was or still is live audio chat room for people, it's not full fledged audio livestreaming platform. Although like vasco said most of the people prefer visual content so idk how popular would be only audio livestreaming platform.

AraceliHarker3• 1 year ago

YouTube has tons of videos saved, doesn't it? The key difference between YouTube and Twitch is profitability. Twitch has never been profitable, and although Amazon has given them free rein until now, they're likely facing pressure to start making money.

physicalscience• 1 year ago

I think Mixlr (https://mixlr.com) might be sort of something you are describing. I know they have been around for a good while as well.

cmcaleer• 1 year ago

I guess it makes sense. I remember once upon a time that Twitch saved every broadcast, in full, forever. That sounds kind of ridiculous these days, but then again YouTube does still does that for everyone’s streams and makes it work. Are there very different economies of scale at work here or are Google just willing to pay the extra money?

bobnamob• 1 year ago

I mean surely twitch(an Amazon brand) is leaning on the s3 scale econ for storage no?

dehrmann2• 1 year ago

an Amazon brand

The word you're looking for is "frugality." This is a tail use case that isn't cheap to run.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

jahsome2• 1 year ago

The post says this rule doesn't apply to past broadcasts. Presumably that means the rule only applies to uploaded videos. Which I did not even realize was a feature, and I've been an avid watcher and occasional broadcaster since the justin days.

Edit: others have explained elsewhere VODs are auto deleted after 60 days, and then must be converted to highlights, which will be affected. I think anyone who relies on Twitch VODs as a viewer or producer is a glutton for punishment anyway. The viewing experience is dreadful if I remember correctly, enough so I just wait for a YouTube upload anyway.

In my anecdotal experience, I have probably watched several thousands of hours of live content over the last decade-plus, and maybe a half dozen VODs.

noirbot• 1 year ago

Twitch VODs aren't really any worse than any other way to watch video? I'll regularly use them when I see some stream I'm interested in while I'm busy with something else, or if I jump into something halfway and want to go back and watch the beginning.

What do you think is dreadful about it?

pdimitar3• 1 year ago

True, that's why I download VODs that are not gated behind subscription with yt-dlp.

...Those that are of interest anyway, which turned out to be less than 1% of what I thought. :D

Twitch's player is indeed terrible and _loves_ to forget where you are. It's hard to believe this is still a problem in 2025...

philistine• 1 year ago

So Twitch is justifying the deletion of content that is very seldom watched ... because the user experience is terrible.

This is a textbook management mistake.

wongarsu2• 1 year ago

However unlike Twitch, Youtube doesn't save recordings of livestreams over 12 hours. Which means that subathons (a format where viewers extend the duration of the stream by donating money) don't get recorded on Youtube.

unshavedyak• 1 year ago

That annoys me quite a bit. I regularly watch Dota series and they can run for 10-14h regularly. It sucks to see it cut off after 12h.

genewitch7• 1 year ago

Okay, but, this is known, right? So the streamer needs to tell yt-dlp to copy the stream to disk so they can re-upload it right after? In fact, this is possible to do programatically probably with some minor fiddling with OBS Studio, right?

is there a hosted product here? Pay-for-use video FXP?

akimbostrawman• 1 year ago

twitch is nowhere near the size of youtube even if streams are usually longer than videos. they also have probably not even 1% of the channel amount and at this point there are more streamer on youtube than twitch. if youtube (google) can, then twitch (amazon) should too.

mjrpes• 1 year ago

It's interesting what this situation would be like if HDD capacity hadn't stopped its exponential growth in 2010: https://imgur.com/a/lWdcjX7

We would be at a penny per terabyte of space. If AV1 in HD can store 400 hours of video per TB, the roughly 24TB to store a 24/7 stream over the course of a year would cost only 25 cents. Providers could keep all video content indefinitely.

Perhaps there's some benefit to this exponential growth coming to an end. Imagine a surveillance state that had near limitless storage and could keep 24/7 recordings indefinitely of cameras on every street, house, vehicle, etc.

fc417fc8023• 1 year ago

Unfortunately that remains a concern. The current research on ML based video codecs is yielding almost unbelievable size results.

Dylan168076• 1 year ago

Low quality video mixed with some key snapshots and full audio would only be about half a terabyte per year. So even with current pricing, a surveillance state can easily pay $3-10 dollars to store that if it wants to.

AraceliHarker3• 1 year ago

Isn't it mostly Twitch Partners who save a lot of videos?

jjice• 1 year ago

I have no idea, but I'd assume the opposite. Twitch partners seem to make up the vast majority of streams from what I've seen. I you take any game and scroll down, there are so many people with 0 to 2 viewers (probably another open tab or a friend) that are generating video that would be stored, but not generating revenue unlike something like a large video game tournament.

I'd guess it's something like 99% of content is seldom, if ever viewed, but I have no clue.

As for videos over 100 hours, it may be mostly top streamers.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

What I don’t get is how YouTube does this. I have all sorts of videos there for archival with very few views and they just keep them? I couldn’t blame them if they deleted the videos though I’d prefer to have some warning. This is a large amount of space for essentially socially useless junk.

Barrin92• 1 year ago

The thing I don't understand about this, why not simply charge the creator for it? I know we live in the age of rent extracting (as per Varoufakis: feudal) internet platforms but markets do actually work. Creators should be customers of a platform like Twitch and pay for services provided and this ceases to be a problem.

If there's value in the VODs for content creators charge them for storage to at least break even, for VODs that don't get any views creators will have an incentive to delete them if they have to pay, problem solved. There's no need for arbitrary 100 hour limits or only targeting x% of creators, just use good old price signals.

rlpb• 1 year ago

Perhaps they predict that not enough people would pay for it such that it's not worth developing such a product in the first place.

cwmoore• 1 year ago

100 hours of video games sounds like a lot, but I’m not familiar with the use case.

Is this content searchable in any meaningful way for the client?

Twitch limiting uploads to 100 hours, deleting the rest starting April 19th

Related Stories